The god problem: when your god is a white supremacist

Or the god problem in the American war on women. Because however we look at it, movements such as white supremacy — modeled after Hitler’s achievements — depend upon an abject belief in some god or other.

I do like to read about what’s going on outside my neighborhood. While in general I ascribe to Harry Stack Sullivan’s pithy description of homo sapiens, “We are all simply more human than otherwise,” I’m as astounded as the next guy to learn about that “otherwise.”

Once in an amused while I thought certain areas of the country would be improved by a calculated infusion of haloperidol in the well water. Silly me. Those people were long ago on top of my conspiratorial suggestion, except instead of ingesting a psychotropic drug that ameliorates paranoia, they’re consciously drinking from huge bottles of new Kool Aid improved by a zap of epinephrine and whatever unknown substance induces the Dunning-Kruger Effect, along with the Desperate For 15-Minutes of Fame Effect.

To wit — or, rather, not to wit:

In a podcast interview posted last spring, Nicole Jorgenson, a singer and former schoolteacher in North Dakota, explains to her host that she has never been happier since marrying and having children. And yet between cute pastoral anecdotes of growing her own vegetables and making banana bread, it soon becomes clear that Ms. Jorgenson is advocating something sinister — not just a return to agrarian motherhood.

She lived in Germany temporarily, she says, but left just before “an influx of refugees took over the country.” She just had a child and thinks the new baby is beautiful — but maybe not quite in the same way all mothers do: “I always wanted children that looked like me,” she says, “blond-haired, blue-eyed babies, but I kind of had to say it under my breath.”

By the time the interviewer begins to gush about how wonderful it is that Ms. Jorgenson and her husband are both of Norwegian heritage — “you guys come from the same blood” — it’s clear what political demographic both women are catering to. Ms. Jorgenson is being interviewed on Radio 3Fourteen, a white supremacist talk radio program; it is interviewing her because she considers herself a tradwife.